In integrated circuit (IC) design, the contribution to the variance in a circuit specification may vary largely between the different components in the IC design (e.g., “mismatch variation”). Accordingly, certain components may have a large contribution to overall performance variance. Typical remedies to correct for a component mismatch variation include increasing the overall size of the component (e.g., area, width, length, and the like). However, precisely establishing which of the circuit components has a large mismatch variation contribution includes performing costly circuit simulations, e.g., Monte Carlo (MC) simulations, involving the use of intensive computation resources and time. Moreover, increasing a component size without a precise knowledge of which components contribute most, and by how much, to performance variance, may undesirably and unnecessarily increase overall IC design size. In addition, it is desirable to determine how much mismatch variance reduction is obtained for a given size increase in a component, so that a minimal size increase is applied and only to the critical components. Typically, this determination involves a new set of circuit simulations, thus exacerbating design costs, as noted above.
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